Word Origins And How We Know Them

Etymology for Everyone

Anatoly Liberman

Word Origins is the first book to offer a thorough investigation of the history and the science of etymology

Anatoly Liberman is an internationally acclaimed etymologist

Liberman takes the reader by the hand and explains the many ways that English words can be made, and the many ways in which etymologists try to unearth the origins of words.

Word Origins And How We Know Them

Etymology for Everyone

Anatoly Liberman

Description

Written in a funny, charming, and conversational style, Word Origins is the first book to offer a thorough investigation of the history and the science of etymology, making this little-known field accessible to everyone interested in the history of words.

Anatoly Liberman, an internationally acclaimed etymologist, takes the reader by the hand and explains the many ways that English words can be made, and the many ways in which etymologists try to unearth the origins of words. Every chapter is packed with dozens of examples of proven word histories, used to illustrate the correct ways to trace the origins of words as well as some of the egregiously bad ways to trace them. He not only tells the known origins of hundreds of words, but also shows how their origins were determined. And along the way, the reader is treated to a wealth of fascinating word facts. Did they once have bells in a belfry? No, the original meaning of belfry was siege tower. Are the words isle and island, raven and ravenous, or pan and pantry related etymologically? No, though they look strikingly similar, these words came to English via different routes.

Partly a history, partly a how-to, and completely entertaining, Word Origins invites readers behind the scenes to watch an etymologist at work.

Word Origins And How We Know Them

Etymology for Everyone

Anatoly Liberman

From Our Blog

I keep receiving this question with some regularity (once a year or so), and, since I have answered it several times, I'll confine myself to a few very general remarks. Etymology is a branch of historical linguistics dealing with the origin of words. It looks at the sound shape and meaning of words and at the cultural milieu in which words were coined. Quite often a word has related forms in several languages, and all of them have to be compared.

The strange exclamation in the title means 'Fiddlesticks! Humbug! Nonsense!' Many people will recognize the phrase (for, among others, Dickens and Agatha Christie used it), but today hardly anyone requires Betty Martin's help for giving vent to indignant amazement. However, the Internet is abuzz with questions about the origin of the idiom, guarded explanations, and readers' comments.

This is a postscript to last week's post on fog. To get my point across, as they say, let me begin with a few short remarks on word origins, according to the picture emerging from our best dictionaries.

'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river,'¦ Fog down the river'¦.' This is Dickens (1852). But in 1889 Oscar Wilde insisted that the fogs had appeared in London only when the Impressionists discovered them, that is, they may have been around for centuries, but only thanks to the Impressionists, London experienced a dramatic change in its climate.

The verb curse, as already noted, occurred in Old English, but it has no cognates in other Germanic languages and lacks an obvious etymon. The same, of course, holds for the noun curse. The OED keeps saying that the origin of curse is unknown.

Mr. Madhukar Gogate, a retired engineer from India, has written me several times, and I want to comment on some of his observations. He notes that there is no interest in the reform in Great Britain and the United States. I have to agree.

Curse is a much more complicated concept than blessing, because there are numerous ways to wish someone bad luck. Oral tradition ('folklore') has retained countless examples of imprecations. Someone might want a neighbor's cow to stop giving milk or another neighbor's wife to become barren.

Strangely, both bless and curse are rather hard etymological riddles, though bless seems to pose less trouble, which makes sense: words live up to their meaning and history, and bless, as everybody will agree, has more pleasant connotations than curse.

As usual, let me offer my non-formulaic, sincere thanks for the comments, additions, questions, and corrections. I have a theory that misspellings are the product of sorcery, as happened in my post on the idiom catch a crab (in rowing). According to the routine of many years, I proofread my texts with utmost care.

Last week some space was devoted to the crawling, scratching crab, so that perhaps enlarging on the topic 'Crab in Idioms' may not be quite out of place. The plural in the previous sentence is an overstatement, for I have only one idiom in view. The rest is not worthy of mention: no certain meaning and no explanation. But my database is omnivorous and absorbs a lot of rubbish. Bibliographers cannot be choosers.

My travel through the English kr-words began with the verb creep, for I have for a long time tried to solve its mystery. On the face of it, there is no mystery. The verb has existed in Germanic from time immemorial, with cognates all over the place.

Those who have followed this series will remember that English kl-words form a loose fraternity of clinging, clinking, and clotted-cluttered things. Clover, cloth, clod, cloud, and clout have figured prominently in the story.

There was a desperate attempt to find a valid Greek cognate for cloth, but such a word did not turn up. One way out of the difficulty was to discover a Greek noun or verb beginning with sk- and refer its s to what is known as s-mobile ('movable s'). Movable s is all over the place. For instance, the English cognate of German kratzen is scratch (the same meaning).

All words, especially kl-words, and no play will make anyone dull. The origin of popular sayings is an amusing area of linguistics, but, unlike the origin of words, it presupposes no technical knowledge. No grammar, no phonetics, no nothin': just sit back and relax, as they say to those who fly overseas first class. So here is another timeout.

I keep clawing at the bars of the cage I built for myself. But first a digression. Walter W. Skeat wrote numerous notes on English etymology, some of which he eventually put together and published in book form. Much to my regret, not too many kl-words attracted his attention. But I was amused to discover that the verb clop means not only the sound made by shoes or hoofs but also 'to cling, adhere to.'

Perhaps the story would not have been worth telling if German and Dutch klein, the closest cognates of Engl. clean, did not mean 'small.' Long ago, on 4 July 2007, I devoted half of my post to the adjective mad.

As I have observed in the past, the best way for me to make sure that I have an audience is to say something deemed prejudicial or wrong. Then one or more readers will break their silence, and I'll get the recognition I deserve (that is, my comeuppance).

Engl. cloud belongs so obviously with clod and its kin that there might not even be a questionÂ­Â­Â­Â­ of its origin (just one more lump), but for the first recorded sense of clÅ«d in Old English, which was 'rock, cliff.'

Once again, no gleanings: the comments have been too few, and there have been no questions. Perhaps when the time for a real rich harvest comes, I'll start gleaning like a house on fire. When last week I attacked the verb clutter, I planned on continuing with the kl-series; my next candidates were cloud and cloth.

In an old post, I once referred to Jack London's Martin Eden, a book almost forgotten in this country and probably in the rest of the English-speaking world. Martin is not Jack London's self-portrait; yet the novel is to a great extent autobiographical.

I expected that my series on dogs would inspire a torrent of angry comments. After all, dog is one of the most enigmatic words in English etymology, but the responses were very few. I am, naturally, grateful to those who found it possible to say something about the subject I was discussing for five weeks, especially to those who liked the essays.

My series on the etymology of dog and other nouns with canine roots has come to an end, but, before turning to another subject, I would like to say a few moderately famous last words. For some reason, it is, as already mentioned, just the names of the dog that are particularly obscure in many languages (the same holds for bitch and others).

The origin of Engl. dog will not look like a uniquely formidable problem if we realize that the names of our best quadruped friend are, from an etymological point of view, impenetrable almost all over the world. The literature on dog is huge, and the conjectures are many.

Here is a phrase whose origin seems to be known, but, as this does not mean that everybody knows it, a short discussion may not be out of place. I have such a huge database of idioms that once in six weeks or so I am seized with a desire to share my treasures with the public.

By this time, the thrust of the posts united by the title 'Not a dog's chance' must be clear. While dealing with some animal names, we plod through a swamp (or a bog, or a quagmire) and run into numerous monosyllabic words of varying structure (both vowels and consonants alternate in them), lacking a clear etymology, and designating several creatures, sometimes having nothing to do with one another (for instance, 'doe' and 'grasshopper,' though this is an extreme case).

Unlike tyke, bitch can boast of respectable ancestors, because its Old English form (bicce) has been recorded. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology notes that bicce is obscurely related to Old Icelandic bikkja (the same meaning). The OED online never uses the phrase obscurely related, and this is a good thing, for this verbal formula, which so often occurred in the past, is itself obscure.

The word dog is the bªte noire of English etymology. Without obvious cognates anywhere (the languages that have dog are said to have borrowed it from English), it had a shadowy life in Old English but managed to hound from its respectable position the ancient name of man's best friend, the name it has retained in the rest of Germanic.

Responses to my plea for suggestions concerning spelling reform were very few. I think we can expect a flood of letters of support and protest only if at least part of the much-hoped-for change reaches the stage of implementation. I received one letter telling me to stop bothering about nonsense and to begin doing something sensible.

To reconstruct an ancient root with a measure of verisimilitude is not too hard. However, it should be borne in mind that the roots are not the seeds from which words sprout, for we compare such words as are possibly related and deduce, or abstract their common part. Later we call this part 'root,' tend to put the etymological cart before the horse, and get the false impression that that common part generates or produces words.

In the recent post on bosom, I wrote that one day I would perhaps also deal with breast. There is nothing new I can say about it, but perhaps not all of our readers know the details of the word's history and the controversy about its origin.

The proverb in the title of this post rarely, if ever, occurs in modern literature and may even have been forgotten but for the title of Dorothy Sayers' novel. However, at one time it was well-known, and extensive literature is devoted to it. The publications appeared not only in the indispensable Notes and Queries, American Notes and Queries, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine but also in such great newspapers and periodicals as The British Apollo and Churchman's Shilling Magazine, to say nothing of Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom.

Preparation for the Spelling Congress is underway. The more people will send in their proposals, the better. On the other hand (or so it seems to me), the fewer people participate in this event and the less it costs in terms of labor/labour and money, the more successful it will turn out to be. The fate of English spelling has been discussed in passionate terms since at least the 1840s.

Last week, I discussed the role of taboo in naming animals, a phenomenon that often makes a search for origins difficult or even impossible. Still another factor of the same type is the presence of migratory words. The people of one locality may have feared, hunted, or coexisted in peace with a certain animal for centuries. They, naturally, call it something.

The idea of today's post was inspired by a question from a correspondent. She is the author of a book on foxes and wanted more information on the etymology of fox. I answered her but thought that our readers might also profit by a short exploration of this theme. Some time later I may even risk an essay on the fully opaque dog. But before coming to the point, I will follow my hero's habits and spend some time beating about the bush and covering my tracks.

Last week I mentioned my 'strong suspicion' that bosom has the same root ('to inflate') as the verb boast. As a matter of fact, it was a conviction, not a suspicion, but I did not want to show my cards too early. Before plunging into matters etymological, perhaps something should be said about the word's bizarre spelling.

Not too long ago I discussed the origin of the verb brag, and already then knew that the turn of boast would soon come round. The etymology of boast is not transparent, but, in my opinion, it is not beyond recovery. Rather than following the immortal royal advice ('begin at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop'), I'll reverse my route and begin at the end.

It is the origin of idioms that holds out the greatest attraction to those who care about etymology. I have read with interest the comments on all the phrases but cannot add anything of substance to what I wrote in the posts. My purpose was to inspire an exchange of opinions rather than offer a solution. While researching by Jingo, I thought of the word jinn/ jinnee but left the evil spirit in the bottle.

Last week, in discussing the antiquated idiom hang out the broom, I mentioned kick the bucket and will now return to it. In the entry bucket2, the OED, usually reticent about the origin of such phrases, mentioned what Murray considered might be the most plausible idea. I am writing this essay for two reasons.

We know even less about the origin of idioms than about the origin of individual words. This is natural: words have tangible components: roots, suffixes, consonants, vowels, and so forth, while idioms spring from customs, rites, and general experience. Yet both are apt to travel from land to land and be borrowed. Who was the first to suggest that beating (or flogging) a willing horse is a silly occupation, and who countered it with the idea that beating a dead horse is equally stupid?

The lines above look (and sound) like identical oaths, but that happens only because of the ambiguity inherent in the preposition by. No one swears by my name, while Mr. Jingo has not written or published anything. Nowadays, jingoism 'extreme and aggressive patriotism' and jingoist do not seem to be used too often, though most English speakers still understand them, but in Victorian England, in the late nineteen-seventies and some time later, the words were on everybody's lips.

Some of the most enjoyable comments and questions are those that combine scholarship and play. One of our correspondents pointed out that Engl. strawberry, if pronounced as a Slavic word, means (literally) 'from grass take.' Indeed it does! In the Russian s travy beri, only one ending does not quite match Engl. s-traw-berry.

Those who read word columns in newspapers and popular journals know that columnists usually try to remain on the proverbial cutting edge of politics and be 'topical.' For instance, I can discuss any word I like, and in the course of more than ten years I have written essays about words as different as dude and god (though my most popular stories deal with smut; I have no idea why).

It so happens that I have already touched on the first and the last member of the triad whether'wether'weather in the past. By a strange coincidence, the interval between the posts dealing with them was exactly four years: they appeared on 19 April 2006 (weather) and 21 April 2010 (whether) respectively.

If things happened as they are suggested in the title above, I would not have been able to write this post, and, considering that 2016 has just begun, it would have been a minor catastrophe. People of all ages and, as they used to say, from all walks of life want to know something about word origins, but they prefer to ask questions about 'colorful' words (slang).

I often refer to the English etymological dictionary by Hensleigh Wedgwood, and one of our correspondents became seriously interested in this work. He wonders why the third edition is not available online. I don't know, but I doubt that it is protected by copyright. It is even harder for me to answer the question about the changes between the second and the third edition.

The author of the pronouncement in the title above is a matter of dispute, and we'll leave his name in limbo, where I believe it belongs. The Internet will supply those interested in the attribution with all the information they need. The paradoxical dictum (although the original is in French, even Murray's OED gave its English version in the entry blunder) is ostensibly brilliant but rather silly.

In their search for the origin of blunt, etymologists roamed long and ineffectually among similar-sounding words and occasionally came close to the sought-for source, though more often look-alikes led them astray. One of such decoys was Old Engl. blinn. Blinn and blinnan meant 'cessation' and 'to cease' respectively, but how can 'cease' and 'devoid of sharpness; obtuse' be related?

Yes, you understood the title and identified its source correctly: this pseudo-Shakespearean post is meant to keep you interested in the blog 'The Oxford Etymologist' and to offer some new ideas on the origin of the highlighted adjective.

Obviously, I would not have embarked on such a long manhunt if I did not have my idea on the origin of the troublesome word. It will probably end up in the dustbin (also known as ash heap) of etymology, but there it will come to rest in good company.

It is true that the etymology of homo confirms the biblical story of the creation of man, but I am not aware of any other word for 'man' that is akin to the word for 'earth.' Latin mas (long vowel, genitive maris; masculinus ends in two suffixes), whose traces we have in Engl. masculine and marital and whose reflex, via French, is Engl. male, referred to 'male,' not to 'man.'

This is the continuation of the story about the origin of the Germanic word for man. Last week I left off after expressing great doubts about the protoform that connected man and guma and tried to defend the Indo-European girl from an unpronounceable name. As could be expected, in their attempts to discover the origin of man etymologists cast a wide net for words containing m and n.

The title will probably be recognized at once: it is part of the last line of Kipling's poem 'If.' Unfortunately, Kipling's only son John never became a man; he was killed in 1918 at the age of eighteen, a casualty of his father's overblown patriotism. Our chances to reach consensus on the origin of the word man are not particularly high either.

For a long time I have been dealing with the words bad, bed, bud, body, bodkin, butt, bottom, and their likes. The readers who have followed the discussion will probably guess from today's title that now the time of path has come round.

I keep receiving comments and questions about idioms. One of our correspondents enjoys the phrase drunk as Cooter Brown. This is a well-known simile, current mostly or exclusively in the American south. I can add nothing to the poor stock of legends connected with Mr. Brown. Those who claim that they know where such characters came from should be treated with healthy distrust.

As promised in the previous post, I am going from body to bottom. No one attacked my risky etymology of body. Perhaps no one was sufficiently interested, or (much more likely) the stalwarts of the etymological establishment don't read this blog and have no idea that a week ago a mine was planted under one of their theories.

I am not sure that any lexicographer or historian of linguistics thought of writing an essay on James Murray as a speaker and journalist, though such an essay would allow the author to explore the workings of Murray's mind and the development of his style. (Let me remind our readers that Murray, 1837-1915, died a hundred years ago.)

Few people would today have remembered the word bodkin if it had not occurred in the most famous of Hamlet's monologues. Chaucer was the earliest author in whose works bodkin occurred. At its appearance, it had three syllables and a diphthong in the root, for it was spelled boidekin. The suffix -kin suggested to John Minsheu, our first English etymologist (1617), that he was dealing with a Dutch noun.

It so happened that I have been 'gleaning' the whole month, but today I'll probably exhaust the questions received during the last weeks. From a letter: 'I have been told Norwegians would say forth and back rather that back and forth since it was logical for them to envision going away, then coming back.'

Not too long ago, I promised to return to the origin of b-d words. Today I'll deal with Engl. bad and its look-alikes, possibly for the last time'not because everything is now clear (nothing is clear), but because I have said all I could, and even this post originated as an answer to the remarks by our correspondents John Larsson (Denmark) and Olivier van Renswoude (the Netherlands).

What is the origin of the now popular phrase in the house, as in 'Ladies and gentlemen, Bobby Brown is in the house'? I don't know, but a short explanation should be added to my response. A good deal depends on the meaning of the question 'What is the origin of a certain phrase?' If the querist wonders when the phrase surfaced in writing, the date, given our resources, is usually ascertainable.

This is the continuation of last week's 'gleanings.' Once again, I hasten to thank our correspondents for their questions and comments and want only to say something on the matter of protocol. When I receive private letters, I refer to the writers as 'our correspondents' because I cannot know whether they want to have their names bandied about in the media.

I received a question about the greatest etymologists' active mastery of foreign languages. It is true, as our correspondent indicated, that etymologists have to cast their nets wide and refer to many languages, mainly old (the deader, the better). So would the masters of the age gone by have felt comfortable while traveling abroad, that is, not in the tenth but in the nineteenth century?

This blog column has existed for a month. It was launched with the idea that it would attract questions and comments. If this happens, at the end of each month the rubric "Monthly Gleanings" will appear. Although in March I have not been swamped with the mail, there is enough for a full post. Also, one question was asked privately, but in connection with the blog, so that I think I may answer it here.

The shape of the word weather has changed little since it was first attested in the year 795. In Old English, it had d in place of th; the rest, if we ignore its present day spelling with ea, is the same. But its range of application has narrowed down to 'condition of the atmosphere,' while at that time it also meant 'air; sky; breeze; storm.'

While working on my etymological database, I looked through countless old journals and magazines. I especially enjoyed reading the reviews of etymological dictionaries published in their pages. Some were shockingly abrasive, even virulent; others delightfully chatty and unabashedly superficial.

Our egalitarian predilections have partly wiped out the difference between 'vulgar' and 'cool,' and the idea of being judgmental or appearing better educated than one's neighbor scares the living daylights out of intellectuals. Dictionaries, we are told, should be descriptive, not prescriptive.

Many words resemble mushrooms growing on a tree stump: they don't have common roots but are still related. I will use few examples, because if you've seen one, you've seen them all. Nothing is known about the origin of cub, which surfaced in English texts only in 1530 (that is, surprisingly late).

On August 23, I appeared on the 'Midmorning' show on Minnesota Public Radio. Many of you called in with questions, to some of which I could give immediate answers. But, the origin of several words I did not remember offhand and I promised to look them up in my database. Here are my responses.

Only children and foreigners express their surprise when they discover that the verb long does not mean 'lengthen' or that belong has nothing to do with longing. When we grow up, we stop noticing how confusing such similarities of form coupled with differences in meaning are.

Some time ago I received a question about the word macabre. This adjective first appeared in Old French, in the phrase dancemacabre. The story begins with the fresco of the Dance Macabre, painted in 1424 in the Church of Innocents at Paris. The English poet and monk John Lydgate knew the fresco.

Superstitions, unlike knowledge, spread quickly. Students' spelling breaks every instructor's heart, and we ask ourselves the question: How did so many people from all over the country, come to the unanimous conclusion that occurrence should be spelled occurance? It is, I believe, a huge conspiracy.

Even a quick look at the history of words meaning 'break' shows how often they begin with the sound group br-. Break has cognates in several Germanic languages. The main Old Scandinavian verb was different (compare Modern Swedish bryta, Norwegian bryte, and so forth), but it, too, began with br-.

When I was growing up, I read Paul de Kruif's book Microbe Hunters so many times that I still remember some pages by heart. Two chapters in the book are devoted to Pasteur. The second is called 'Pasteur and the Mad Dog.' A book about great word hunters would similarly enthral the young and the old.

Language changes through variation. Some people 'sneaked', others 'snuck'. The two forms may coexist for a long time, or one of them may be considered snobbish. Once the snobs die out, the form will go to rest with them. Or the snobs may feel embarrassed of being in the minority and 'go popular'.

The Devil is in people's thoughts, and his names are many. One of them is the obscure 'Old Nick'. The word nicker 'water sprite' explained as an old participle 'washed one' - is unrelated to it. Then there is 'nickel'. The term was easy to coin, but copper could not be obtained from the nickel ore.

Two opposite forces act on the brain of someone who sets out to trace the origin of a word. To cite the most famous cases, coward is supposedly a 'corruption' of cowherd and sirloin came into being when an English king dubbed an edible loin at table (Sir Loin). Such fantasies have tremendous appeal.

It is not fortuitous that many words like 'puzzle', 'conundrum', and 'quiz' are themselves puzzles from an etymological point of view. They arose as slang, sometimes as student slang, and as we don't know the circumstances in which they were coined, our chances of discovering their origin is low.

This story might be titled 'Some Words Have a Reputation to Live Up To,' (Part Two). While tracing the convoluted history of 'charade', I promised to devote some space to 'charlatan'. The element 'char-' unites them, and in scholarly works they have frequently been mentioned in one breath.

Hello. In connection a previous post, I received two questions about the word 'hello'. The first concerned the repertory of h-interjections in the languages of the world. In 1924 Ernst Schwentner brought out a booklet titled 'The Primary Interjections in the Indo-European Languages' (in German).

In the course of this month, two journalists have approached me with questions related to political scandals. My answers, neither of which has been printed in full, may perhaps interest the readers of our blog. They regarded the typicality of phrases such as Ponzi schemes, and using names as verbs.

A word, some scholars say, can have several etymologies. This is a misleading formulation. Various factors contribute to a word's meaning and form. All of them should be taken into account and become part of the piece of information we call etymology, because words are like human beings.

Long ago I wrote a column with the title 'Tit for Tat.' Engl. tip for tap also existed at one time. Words like tip, tap, top, tick, tack, tock, tit, tat, tot, as well as those with voiced endings like tid- (compare tidbit), tad, and tod ('bush; fox'), are ideal candidates for sound imitative coinages.

The number of people in the English speaking world who distinguish in pronunciation between witch and which, wine and whine, wen and when is relatively small, and those who make this distinction do not say w-hitch, w-hine, and w-hen, but rather hwitch, hwine, and hwen. What follows is a breathtaking story of the hw-sound and the wh-spelling.

By Anatoly LibermanLast week I discussed the origin of the word cushion. Our correspondent wonders whether we are perhaps talking about bedrolls here. Judging by medieval miniatures from the East, old cushions were like those known to us, but the broad scope of referents, with the same word serving as the name of a cushion, bedcover, and mattress, does pose the question of the original object's form and uses. The reconstructed sense 'bundle'

By Anatoly Liberman There is something righteous about the right hand: it is supposed to point in the right direction and do everything right. In older Indo-European, even a special word existed for 'right hand,' as evidenced by Greek dexios (stress on the last syllable), Latin dexter, and others. A strong association connects the right hand with the south and the left hand with the north. Someone standing with his face turned to the rising sun (for example, while praying), will have his right hand stretched to the south and his left hand to the north. Old Irish tuath meant both 'north' and 'left' (when facing east). This case is not unique.

By Anatoly Liberman Is Standard English pronunciation a viable concept? I think it is, even if only to a point. People's accents differ, but some expectation of a more or less leveled pronunciation (that is, of the opposite of a broad dialect) in great public figures and media personalities probably exists. Jimmy Carter seems to have made an effort to sound less Georgian after he became President. If I am not mistaken, John Kennedy tried to suppress some of the most noticeable features of his Bostonian accent. But perhaps those changes happened under the influence of the new environment. In some countries, the idea of 'Standard' has a stronger grip

By Anatoly Liberman The most universal law of etymology is that we cannot explain the origin of a word unless we have a reasonably good idea of what the thing designated by the word means. For quite some time people pointed to India as the land in which rum was first consumed and did not realize that in other European languages rum was a borrowing from English. The misleading French spelling rhum suggested a connection with Greek rheum 'stream, flow' (as in rheumatism). According to other old conjectures, rum is derived from aroma or saccharum. India led researchers to Sanskrit roma 'water' as the word's etymon, and this is what many otherwise solid 19th-century dictionaries said. Webster gave the vague, even meaningless reference 'American,' but on the whole, the choice appeared to be between East and West Indies. Skeat, in the first edition of his d

By Anatoly Liberman Why indeed? But despite our financial woes, I am interested in the origin of the idiom, not in exorbitant prices. On the face of it (and the nose cannot be separated from the face), the idiom paythrough the nose makes no sense. Current since the second half of the 17th century and probably transparent to the contemporaries, it later joined such puzzling phrases as kick the bucket and bees' knees. Idioms are harder to trace to their 'roots' than words. Etymology, though not an exact science, is governed by certain regularities (sound correspondences, patterns of semantic change, and so forth), but a search for the origin of idioms rarely needs the expertise of historical linguists. They will offer good

By Anatoly Liberman In 1984, old newspapers were regularly rewritten, to conform to the political demands of the day. With the Internet, the past is easy to alter. In a recent post, I mentioned C. Sweet, the man who discovered the origin of the word pedigree, and added (most imprudently) that I know nothing about this person and that he was no relative of the famous Henry Sweet. Stephen Goranson pointed out right away that in Skeat's article devoted to the subject, C. was expanded to Charles and that Charles Sweet was Henry's brother. I have the article in my office, which means I, too, at one time read it and knew who C. Sweet was. Grieved and

By Anatoly Liberman It seems reasonable that brisket should in some way be related to breast: after all, brisket is the breast of an animal. But the path leading from one word to the other is neither straight nor narrow. Most probably, it does not even exist. In what follows I am greatly indebted to the Swedish scholar Bertil Sandahl, who published an article on brisket and its cognates in 1964. The Oxford English Dictionary has no citations of brisket prior to 1450, but Sandahl discovered bresket in a document written in 1328-1329, and if his interpretation is correct, the date should be pushed back quite considerably. Before 1535, the favored (possibly, the only) form in English was bruchet(te).

By Anatoly LibermanOld codger is a phrase most speakers of American English still understand (in British English it has much greater currency), but cadger is either obsolete or dead. Yet the two words are often discussed in concert. A cadger was a traveling vendor, whose duties may have differed from that of a hawker, a peddler (the British spelling is pedlar), or a badger, but all those people were street dealers of sorts. The OED defines cadger so: 'a carrier; esp. a species of itinerant dealer who travels with a horse and cart (or formerly with a pack-horse), collecting butter, eggs, poultry, etc., from remote country farms for disposal in the town, and at the same time supplying the rural districts with small wares from the shops.' This meaning was recorded as early as the middle of the 15th century. Derogatory senses like 'a person prone to mooching' surfaced in books much later. Also late is the verb

By Anatoly LibermanLast week I wrote that one day I would reproduce some memorable statements from Skeat's letters to the editors. This day has arrived. I have several cartons full of paper clippings, the fruit of the loom that has been whirring incessantly for more than twenty years: hundreds of short and long articles about lexicographers, with Skeat occupying a place of honor. A self-educated man in everything that concerned the history of Germanic, he became the greatest expert in Old and Middle English and an incomparable etymologist. In England, only Murray, the editor of the OED, and Henry Sweet were his equals, and in Germany, only Eduard Sievers. Joseph Wright, another autodidact

This is an old chestnut. How did 'Raining Cats and Dogs' come into being, and stay, in the language? The possibilities are few. A foreign phrase is occasionally repeated verbatim or nearly so, and turns into gibberish. It is possible that the first 'cats and dogs' were not even animal names.

English is a language of limitless opportunities. Strange things happen in it. Some words are spelled alike but pronounced differently: 'bow' (the bow of a ship) and 'bow' (bow and arrows); 'row' (she kicked up a row) and 'row' (the front row); 'permit' (the verb) and 'permit' (the noun).

This is my 500th post for 'The Oxford Etymologist,' nine and a half years after this blog started in March 2006, and I decided to celebrate this event by writing something light and entertaining. Enough wrestling with words like bad, good, and god! Anyone can afford a week's break. So today I'll discuss an idiom that sounds trivial only because it is so familiar. Familiarity breeds not only contempt but also indifference.

The question then is: 'What does the root gu- signify?' The procedure consists in finding some word in Germanic and ideally outside Germanic in which gu- or g-, followed by another vowel and alternating with u means something compatible with the idea of 'god.' Here, however, is the rub. Old Germanic gu°- certainly existed, but we don't know what it meant when it was coined centuries before it surfaced in texts.

From what was said last week it follows that pagans did not need a highly charged word for 'god,' let alone 'God.' They recognized a hierarchy of supernatural beings and the division of labor in that 'heavenly' crowd. Some disturbed our dreams, some bereaved us of reason, and still others inflicted diseases and in general worked evil and mischief.

While dealing with the etymology of the adjective bad, I realized that an essay on good would be vapid. The picture in Germanic and Slavic with respect to good is trivial, while the word's ties outside those two groups are bound to remain unclear. Especially troublesome is Greek agath³s 'good,' from which we have the given name Agatha.

During the month of July I have received some questions, comments, and queries about things new to me. Thus, I know next to nothing about Latvian (my Indo-European interests more often make me turn to Lithuanian) and feel insecure when it comes to Romance etymology. The questions made me examine the areas that would under normal circumstances have not attracted my attention, and I am pleased.

Hermaphrodites are born rarely, and it is far from clear why their mythology achieved such prominence in Antiquity. Reference to cross-dressing during certain marriage rites does not go far, but the cult of Hermaphroditus is a fact, and Ovid's tale of the union in one body of the son of Hermes and Aphrodite is well-known.

For a long time the etymology of the word bad has been at the center of my attention (four essays bear ample witness to this fact), and the latest post ended with a cautious reference to the idea that Middle Engl. bad ~ badde, a noun that occurred only once in 1350 and whose meaning seems to have been 'cat,' is, from an etymological point of view, identical with the adjective bad.

The authority of the OED is so great that, once it has spoken, few people are eager to contest or even modify its verdict. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology adds perhaps (not probably!) to Murray's etymology, cites both b¦ddel and b¦dling (it gives length to ¦ in both words) and adds that there have been other, more dubious conjectures.

Quite often the first solid etymology of an English word comes from Skeat, but this is not the case with the adjective bad. In the first edition of his dictionary (1882), he could offer, with much hesitation, two Celtic cognates of bad, one of them being Irish Gaelic baodh 'vain, giddy, foolish, simple.' Much later, Charles Mackay, who believed that Irish Gaelic was the source of most English words, mentioned beud 'mischief, hurt' as the etymon of bad.

Several years ago, I wrote a post on the origin of the word frigate. The reason I embarked on that venture was explained in the post: I had run into what seemed to me a promising conjecture by Vittorio Pisani. As far as I could judge, his note had attracted no attention, and I felt it my duty to rectify the injustice.

The origin of plant names is one of the most interesting areas of etymology. I have dealt with henbane, hemlock, horehound, and mistletoe and know how thorny the gentlest flowers may be for a language historian. It is certain that horehound has nothing to do with hounds, and I hope to have shown that henbane did not get its name because it is particularly dangerous to hens (which hardly ever peck at it, and even if they did, why should they have been chosen as the poisonous plant's preferred victims?).

Our earliest etymologists did not realize how much trouble the adjective bad would give later researchers. The first of them'John Minsheu (1617) and Stephen Skinner (1671)'cited Dutch quaad 'bad, evil; ill.' (Before going on, I should note that today quad is spelled kwaad, which shows that a civilized nation using the Roman alphabet can do very well without the letter q.)

In the near future I'll have more than enough to say about bad, an adjective whose history is dismally obscure, but once again, and for the umpteenth time, we have to ask ourselves why there are words of undiscovered and seemingly undiscoverable origin. Historical linguists try to reconstruct ancient roots.

As a rule, I try not to deal with the words whose origin is supposedly known (that is, agreed upon). One can look them up in any dictionary or on the Internet, and no one needs a blog for disseminating trivialities. The etymology of bed has reached the stage of an uneasy consensus, but recently the accepted explanation has again been called into question.

Most of what I had to say on bug can be found in my book Word Origins and in my introductory etymological dictionary. But such a mass of curious notes, newspaper clippings, and personal letters fester in my folders that it is a pity to leave them there unused until the crack of etymological doom. So I decided to offer the public a small plate of leftovers in the hope of providing a dessert after the stodgy essays on bars, barrels, barracks, and barricades, to say nothing about cry barley.

In the United States everything is planned very long in advance, while in Europe one can sometimes read about a conference that will be held a mere three months later. By that time all the travel money available to an American academic will have been spent a millennium ago. In the United States, we have visions rather than short-range plans.

Last week, I wrote about the idiom to cry barley, used by children in Scotland and in the northern counties of England, but I was interested in the word barley 'peace, truce' rather than the phrase. Today I am returning to the north, and it is the saying the bishop has put (or set) his foot in it that will be at the center of our attention.

Girls, in some parts of England and the United States, say, or rather chant, while bouncing a ball: 'One, two, three, alairy, four five, six, alairy,' and so on. According to an 'eyewitness report,' they say so, while bouncing a ball on the ground, catching it with one hand, keeping the score, and accompanying each alairy with a circular swing of the leg, so as to describe a loop around but not obstruct the rising ball.

To finish the bar(r)-series, I deviated from my usual practice and chose a word about which there is at present relatively little controversy. However, all is not clear, and two theories about the origin of barricade still compete. According to one, the story begins with words like Italian barra and French barre 'bar' (barricades bar access to certain places), while, according to the other, the first barricades were constructed of barrels filled with earth, stones, and the like, so that the starting point should be French barrique or Spanish barrica.

The post two weeks ago was devoted to the origin and history of bar. In English, all words with the root bar- ~ barr- are from French. They usually have related forms in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, but their source in the Romance-speaking world remains a matter of unending debate.

Last month was a disaster: I confused the Wednesdays and then wrote 2014 for 2015. A student of the Middle Ages, I often forget in which millennium I live, so plus or minus one year does not really matter. We say: 'The migration happened six or seven thousand years ago.' This is the degree of precision to which I am accustomed.

For some reason, interest in the etymology of copasetic never abates. This adjective, a synonym of the equally infantile hunky-dory, is hardly ever used today unless the speaker wants to sound funny, but I cannot remember a single talk on words without someone's asking me about its derivation and thinking that the question is of a most imaginative kind.

I have always been interested in linguistic heavy metal. In the literature on English phrases, two 'metal idioms' have attracted special attention: dead as a doornail and to get (come) down to brass tacks. The latter phrase has fared especially well; in recent years, several unexpected early examples of it have been unearthed.

Many thanks for comments, questions, and reprimands, even though sometimes I am accused of the sins I have not committed. If I were a journalist, I would say that my remarks tend to be taken out of context. Of course I know what precession of the equinoxes is and italicized e, to point out that it is indeed the right form (precession, not procession).

One should not be too enthusiastic about anything. Wholly overwhelmed by the thought that winter is behind, I forgot to consult the calendar and did not realize that 25 March was the last Wednesday of the month and celebrated the spring equinox instead of providing our readership with the traditional monthly gleanings.

This is the week of the spring equinox, but I decided not to wait until June and write a post about the solstice. For a change, bonfire is 'a word of (fairly well-)known origin,' so don't expect revelations. However, it is always instructive to observe people beating about the bush long after it has burned up. The image of beating about the bush suggested the title of this post.

If you know the saying ossing comes to bossing, rest assured that it does not mean the same as ossing is bossing. But you may never have heard either of those phrases, though the verb oss 'to try, dare' is one of the favorites of English dialectology.

I was twelve years old when I first read Jack London's novel Martin Eden, and it remained my favorite book for years. Few people I know have heard about it, which is a pity. Jack London was a superb story teller, but his novels belong to what is called politely the history of literature'all or almost all except Martin Eden.

I received a question whether I was going to write about the word key in the series on our habitat. I didn't have such an intention, but, since someone is interested in this matter, I'll gladly change my plans and satisfy the curiosity of our friend.

One month is unlike another. Sometimes I receive many letters and many comments; then lean months may follow. February produced a good harvest ('February fill the dyke,' as they used to say), and I can glean a bagful. Perhaps I should choose a special title for my gleanings: 'I Am All Ears' or something like it.

The previous post dealt with the uneasy history of the word threshold, and throughout the text I wrote thresh~ thrash, as though those were two variants of the same word. Yet today they are two different words, and their relation poses a few questions. Old English had the strong verb ¾erscan (¾ = th in Engl. thresh), with cognates everywhere in Germanic.

One does not have to be a specialist to suggest that threshold is either a disguised compound or that it contains a root and some impenetrable suffix. Disguised compounds are words like bridal (originally, bride + ale but now not even a noun as in the past, because -al was taken for the suffix of an adjective) or barn, a blend of the words for 'barley,' of which only b is extant, and Old Engl. earn 'house.'

When it comes to origins, we know as little about the word home as about the word house. Distinguished American linguist Winfred P. Lehmann noted that no Indo-European terminology for even small settlements has been preserved in Germanic. And here an important distinction should be made.

I am pleased to report that A Happy New Year is moving along its warlike path at the predicted speed of one day in twenty-four hours and that it is already the end of January. Spring will come before you can say Jack Robinson, as Kipling's bicolored python would put it, and soon there will be snowdrops to glean. Etymology and spelling are the topics today. Some other questions will be answered in February.

It is astounding how mysterious the origin of such simple words as man, wife, son, god, house, and others like them is. They are old, even ancient, and over time their form has changed very little, sometimes not at all, so that we do not have to break through a thicket of sound laws to restitute their initial form.

Probably no other ethnic group has been vilified with so much linguistic ingenuity as the Jews. For the moment I will leave out of account Kike and Smouch and say what little I can about Sheeny, a word first recorded in English in 1824 (so the OED).

A dwelling is, obviously, a place in which someone dwells. Although the word is transparent , the verb dwell is not. Only its derivation poses no problems. Some verbs belong to the so-called causative group. They mean 'to make do or to cause to do.'

Although I am still in 2014, as the title of this post indicates, in the early January one succumbs to the desire to say something memorable that will set the tone to the rest of the year. So I would like to remind everybody that in 1915 James Murray, the first and greatest editor of the Oxford EnglishDictionary (OED) or New English Dictionary (NED), died.

My post on laughing attracted two comments: an alleged counterexample from an Icelandic saga and a veritable flood of vituperation. The second writer was so disgusted that he could not even make himself finish reading the essay.

I have noticed that many of my acquaintances misuse the phrases a dry sense of humor and a quiet sense of humor. Some people can tell a joke with a straight face, but, as a rule, they do it intentionally; their performance is studied and has little to do with 'dryness.'

Two weeks ago, I discussed the troubled origin of the word aye 'yes,' as in theayes have it, and promised to return to this word in connection with some other formulas of affirmation. The main of them is yes.

As always, I want to thank those who have commented on the posts and written me letters bypassing the 'official channels' (though nothing can be more in- or unofficial than this blog; I distinguish between inofficial and unofficial, to the disapproval of the spellchecker and some editors). I only wish there were more comments and letters.

The ayes may have it, but we, poor naysayers, remain in ignorance about the derivation of ay(e) 'yes.' I hope to discuss the various forms of assent in December, and we'll see that that the origin of some synonyms of ay(e) is also enigmatic.

From time to time I receive letters encouraging me to discuss not only words but also idioms. I would be happy to do so if I were better equipped. The origin of proverbial sayings (unless they go back to so-called familiar quotations) and idioms is usually lost beyond recovery.

As I mentioned last time, one of our correspondents asked me whether anything is known about this idiom. My database has very little on brown study, but I may refer to an editorial comment from the indispensable Notes andQueries (1862, 3rd Series/I, p. 190). The writer brings brown study in connection with French humeurbrune, literally 'brown humor, or disposition,' said about a somber or melancholy temperament.

It so happened that at the end of this past summer I was out of town and responded to the questions and comments that had accumulated in August and September in two posts. We have the adjectives biennial and biannual but no such Latinized luxury for the word month.

If you have read the previous parts of this 'study,' you may remember that brown is defined as a color between orange and black, but lexicographical sources often abstain from definitions and refer to the color of familiar objects. They say that brown is the color of mud, dirt, coffee, chocolate, hazel, or chestnut.

I was out of town at the end of this past August and have a sizable backlog of unanswered questions and comments. It may take me two or even three weeks to catch up with them. I am not complaining: on the contrary, I am delighted to have correspondents from Sweden to Taiwan.

Color words are among the most mysterious ones to a historian of language and culture, and brown is perhaps the most mysterious of them all. At first blush (and we will see that it can have a brownish tint), everything is clear. Brown is produced by mixing red, yellow, and black.

Like every other custom in life, kissing has been studied from the historical, cultural, anthropological, and linguistic point of view. Most people care more for the thing than for the word, but mine is an etymological blog.

Yes, this is Post 450. The present blog was launched on March 1, 2006 and has appeared every Wednesday ever since, rain or shine. Another short year, and the jubilant world will celebrate the great number 500.

It occurred to me to write a short essay about the word verve by chance. As a general rule, I try to stick to my last and stay away from Romance etymology, even though the logic of research occasionally makes me meddle with it.

As can be guessed from the above title, my today's subject is the derivation of the word road. The history of road has some interest not only because a word that looks so easy for analysis has an involved and, one can say, unsolved etymology.

Once John Cowan suggested that I touch on the murky history of the noun qualm and try to shed light on it. To the extent that I can trust my database, this word, which is, naturally, featured in all dictionaries, hardly ever appears in the special scholarly literature.

By Anatoly Liberman On 20 November 2013, I discussed the verbs astonish, astound, and stun. Whatever the value of that discussion, it had a truly wonderful picture of a stunned cat and an ironic comment by Peter Maher on the use of the word stunning.

By Anatoly Liberman Since I'll be out of town at the end of July, I was not sure I would be able to write these 'gleanings.' But the questions have been many, and I could answer some of them ahead of time.

By Anatoly Liberman To some people which and witch are homophones. Others, who differentiate between w and wh, distinguish them. This rather insignificant phenomenon is tackled in all books on English pronunciation and occasionally rises to the surface of 'political discourse.'

By Anatoly Liberman Baron, mark, and concise. I am always glad to hear from our readers. This time I noted with pleasure that both comments on baron (see them posted where they belong) were not new to me.

By Anatoly Liberman The names of titles have curious sources and often become international words. The history of some of them graces student textbooks. Marshal, for instance, is an English borrowing from French, though it came to French from Germanic, where it meant 'mare servant' (skalkaz 'servant, slave'). Constable meant 'the count of the stable.'

By Anatoly Liberman I will begin with a short summary of the previous post. In English texts, the noun baron surfaced in 1200, which means that it became current not much earlier than the end of the twelfth century. It has been traced to Semitic (a fanciful derivation), Celtic, Latin (a variety of proposals), and Germanic. The Old English words beorn 'man; fighter, warrior' and bearn 'child; bairn' are unlikely sources of baron.

By Anatoly Liberman Once again we are torn between Rome, the Romance-speaking world, and England. The word baron appeared in English texts in 1200, and it probably became current shortly before that time, for such an important military title would hardly have escaped written tradition for too long.

By Anatoly Liberman Those who will look up the etymology of roil and rile will have to choose between two answers: 'from Old French' or 'of uncertain origin.' Judging by my rather extensive and constantly growing database, roil and rile have attracted little attention

Anatoly Liberman responds to this month's letters. He discusses the hotly contested issue of spelling reform, historical semantics, why words change meaning, the modern usage of the words 'unique' and 'decimate', 'agreement the American way', and explains how university administrators write.

By Anatoly Liberman There is an almost incomprehensible number of English words for money and various coins. Some of them, like shilling, are very old. We know (or we think that we know) where they came from. Other words (the majority) surfaced as slang, and our record of them seldom goes beyond the early modern period.

By Anatoly Liberman If I find enough material, I may tell several stories about how after multiple failures the ultimate origin of a common English word has been found to (almost) everybody's satisfaction. The opening chapter in my prospective Decameron will deal with pedigree, which surfaced in English texts in the early fifteenth century.

By Anatoly Liberman I think some sort of closure is needed after we have heard the arguments for and against spelling reform by two outstanding scholars. Should we do something about English spelling, and, if the answer is yes, what should we do? Conversely, if no, why no?Â

Anatoly Liberman's etymological thoughts and correspondences for April; regarding 'old languages and complexity', the origins of the word 'brothel', why 'selfie' is not such a new term after all, 'to whom it may concern', unintentional wolf puns, and the amusing revenges of time.

By Anatoly Liberman Henry Bradley, while writing his paper (see the previous post), must have looked upon Skeat as his main opponent. This becomes immediately clear from the details. For instance, Skeat lamented the use of the letter c in scissors and Bradley defended it.

By Anatoly Liberman Last week I wrote about Henry Bradley's role in making the OED what it is: a mine of information, an incomparable authority on the English language, and a source of inspiration to lexicographers all over the world

By Anatoly Liberman Those who look up the origin of a word in a dictionary are rarely interested in the sources of the information they find there. Nor do they realize how debatable most of this information is. Yet serious research stands behind even the controversial statements in a modern etymological dictionary.

By Anatoly Liberman At one time I intended to write a series of posts about the scholars who made significant contributions to English etymology but whose names are little known to the general public. Not that any etymologists can vie with politicians, actors, or athletes when it comes to funding and fame, but some of them wrote books and dictionaries and for a while stayed in the public eye.

By Anatoly Liberman Two or three times a year I receive questions about what the profession of an etymologist entails. I usually answer them briefly in my 'gleanings,' and once I even devoted a post to this subject. Perhaps it won't hurt if I return to the often-asked question again.

By Anatoly LibermanBeguines. The origin of Beguine is bound to remain unknown, if 'unknown' means that no answer exists that makes further discussion useless. No doubt, the color gray could give rise to the name. If it were not so, this etymology would not have been offered and defended by many scholars.

By Anatoly Liberman Apart from realizing that each of the three words in question (beggar, bugger, and bigot) needs an individual etymology, we should keep in mind that all of them arose as terms of abuse and sound somewhat alike. The Beguines,Beghards, and Albigensians have already been dealt with.

By Anatoly Liberman Unlike so many words featured in this blog, bugger has a well-ascertained origin, but it belongs with the rest of this series because it sheds light on its companions beggar and bigot.

By Anatoly Liberman The final sentence in the essay posted in January was nota statement but a question. We had looked at several hypotheses on the origin of the verb beg and found that none of them carried conviction. It also remained unclear whether beg was a back formation on beggar or whether beggar arose as a noun agent from the verb.

By Anatoly LibermanBigot will wait until the end of this miniseries, because some time ago (26 October 2011) I published a special post on this word and now have only a short remark to add to it. But beggars and buggers cry out for recognition and should not be denied it.

By Anatoly Liberman What does it take to be a successful etymologist? Obviously, an ability to put two and two together. But all scholarly work, every deduction needs this ability. The more words and forms one knows, the greater is the chance that the result will be reasonably convincing.

By Anatoly Liberman Respectability in etymology is determined by age: the older, the better. The verb to bicker has been known since the fourteenth century, while the verb to bitch 'complain; spoil' is a nineteenth-century invention. On the other hand, the noun bitch occurred already in Old English, so that it is not quite clear which of the two words'bitch or bicker'should be awarded the first place.

By Anatoly Liberman The world has solved its gravest problems, but a few minor ones have remained. Judging by the Internet, the spelling of whoa is among them. Some people clamor for woah, which is a perversion of whoa and hence 'cool'; only bores, it appears, don't understand it. I understand the rebels but wonder.

Why brothel? We will begin with the customer. Bro¾el surfaced in Middle English and meant 'a worthless person; prostitute.' The letters -el are a dead or, to use a technical term, unproductive suffix, but even in the days of its efflorescence it was rarely used to form so-called nomina agentis (agent nouns), the way -er is today added to read and work and yields reader and worker.

By Anatoly Liberman At the end of the nineteenth century, while working on the issue of the OED (then known as NED: New English Dictionary) that was to feature the word gray, James A. H. Murray sent letters to various people, asking their opinion about the differences between the variants gray and grey.

By Anatoly Liberman The shades of gray multiply (as promised in December 2013). Now that we know that greyhounds are not gray, we have to look at our other character, grimalkin. What bothers me is not so much the cat's color or the witch's disposition as the unsatisfactory state of etymology.

By Anatoly Liberman At the end of December people are overwhelmed by calendar feelings: one more year has merged with history, and its successor promises new joys and woes (but thinking of future woes is bad taste). I usually keep multifarious scraps and cuttings to dispose of on the last Wednesday of the year: insoluble questions come and never go away.

By Anatoly Liberman I am returning to greyhound, a word whose origin has been discussed with rare dedication and relatively meager results. The component -hound is the generic word for 'dog' everywhere in Germanic, except English. I am aware of only one attempt to identify -hound with hunter (so in in the 1688 dictionary by Rºnolfur J³nsson).

By Anatoly Liberman One day the great god Thor was traveling and found himself in a remote kingdom whose ruler humiliated him and his companions in every possible way. Much to his surprise and irritation, Thor discovered that he was a poor drinker, a poor wrestler, and too weak to pick up a cat from the floor. To be sure, his host, a cunning illusionist, tricked him.

By Anatoly Liberman Someone who today seeks reliable information on the origin of English words will, naturally, consult some recent dictionary. However, not too rarely this information is insufficient and even wrong (rejected opinions may be presented there as reliable).

By Anatoly Liberman Brave and its aftermath. During the month of November, the main event in the uneventful life of the Oxford Etymologist (in this roundabout way I refer to myself) has been the controversy around the origin of bravus, the etymon of bravo ~ brave.

By Anatoly Liberman There are many ways to be surprised (confounded, dumbfounded, stupefied, flummoxed, and even flabbergasted). While recently discussing this topic, I half-promised to return to it, and, although the origin of astonish ~ astound ~ stun is less exciting than that of amaze, it is perhaps worthy of a brief note.

By Anatoly Liberman One of the minor questions addressed in my latest 'gleanings' concerned the origin of the adjective brave. My comment brought forward a counter-comment by Peter Maher and resulted in an exchange of many letters between us, so that this post owes its appearance to him. Today I am returning to brave, a better-informed and more cautious man.

By Anatoly Liberman Words, as I have noted more than once, live up to their sense. For instance, in searching for the origin of amaze, one encounters numerous truly amazing reefs. This is the story. Old English had the verb amasian 'confuse, surprise.'

By Anatoly LibermanTouch and go. I asked our correspondents whether anyone could confirm or disprove the nautical origin of the idiom touch and go. This is the answer I received from Mr. Jonathan H. Saunders: 'As a Merchant Mariner I have used and heard this term for over thirty years.

By Anatoly Liberman It is hard to hide something (anything) from Stephen Goranson (see his comment to Part 1), who will find a needle in a haystack, and The Canterville Ghost is a rather visible needle. Yet Oscar Wilde is no longer as popular as one could wish for.

By Anatoly Liberman Don't hold your breath: all three words, especially the second and the third, came in from the cold and will return there. Nor do we know whether anything connects them. Deuce is by far the oldest of the three. Our attestations of it go back to the middle of the seventeenth century.

By Anatoly Liberman Every word journalist is on the lookout for interesting pieces of information about language. H. W. Fowler, the author of the great and incomparable book Modern English Usage, confessed that his main reading was newspapers. Naturally: where else could he find so much garbled English?

By Anatoly Liberman As promised, I am returning to the English verb brag and the Old Scandinavian god Bragi (see the previous post). If compared with boast, brag would seem to be more suggestive of bluster and hot air. Yet both may have been specimens of Middle English slang or expressive formations.

By Anatoly Liberman I begin almost every set of gleanings with abject apologies. To err is human. So it is not the mistakes I have made in the past and will make in the future that irritate me but the avoidable and therefore unforgivable slips.

By Anatoly LibermanSimpleton is an irritating word. At first sight, its origin contains no secrets: simple + ton. And that may be all there is to it despite the obscurity of -ton. We find this explanation in the OED and in the dictionaries dependent on it.

By Anatoly Liberman My apologies for the mistakes, and thanks to those who found them. With regard to the word painter 'rope,' I was misled by some dictionary, and while writing about gobble-de-gook, I was thinking of galumph. Whatever harm has been done, it has now been undone and even erased.

By Anatoly Liberman I have received many comments on the posts published in August and many questions. Rather than making these gleanings inordinately long, I have broken them into two parts. Today I'll begin by asking rather than answering questions, because to some queries I am unable to give quotable (or any) answers.

By Anatoly Liberman As always, I am grateful to our correspondents for their questions, suggestions, and corrections. Occasionally I do not respond to their queries because I have nothing to say and keep trying to find a quotable answer.

By Anatoly Liberman I have been meaning to tell the story of askance for quite some time'as a parable or an exemplum. Popular books and blogs prefer to deal with so-called interesting words. Dude, snob, and haberdasher always arouse a measure of enthusiasm, along with the whole nine yards, dated and recent slang, and the outwardly undecipherable family names.

By Anatoly Liberman The phrase put the kibosh on surfaced in texts in the early thirties of the nineteenth century. For a long time etymologists have been trying to discover what kibosh means and where it came from. Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, Gaelic Irish, and French have been explored for that purpose.

By Anatoly Liberman This is a story of the names of two letters. Appreciate the fact that I did not call it 'A Tale of Two Letters.' No other phrase has been pawed over to such an extent as the title of Dickens's novel.

By Anatoly Liberman It is common knowledge that an average page of an English dictionary contains at least twice as many borrowed as native words, even though come, go, see, sit, stand, do, make, man, woman, in, on, and other similar heavy duty words go back to Old English.

By Anatoly Liberman 'Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, where have you been? I've been to London to look at the Queen,/ Pussy-cat, pussy-cat, what did you there?/ I frightened a little mouse under the chair.' Evidently, our power of observation depends on our background and current interests.

By Anatoly Liberman The names of musical instruments constitute one of the most intriguing chapters in the science and pseudoscience of etymology. Many such names travel from land to land, and we are surprised when a word with romantic overtones reveals a prosaic origin. For example, lute is from Arabic (al'ud: the definite article followed by a word for 'wood, timber').

By Anatoly Liberman Contrary to some people's expectation, July has arrived, and it rains incessantly, that is, in the parts of the world not suffering from drought. I often feel guilty on account of my avoiding the burning questions of our time.

By Anatoly Liberman One cannot predict which posts will interest the public and which will leave them indifferent. I hoped that my 'revolutionary' hypothesis on the origin of Old Nick would result in a tidal wave (title wave, as some of my students write), but it did not produce as much as a ripple, whereas the fairly trivial essay on the letter y aroused a lively discussion.

By Anatoly Liberman Petty devils are all around us. Products of so-called low mythology, they often have impenetrable names. (Higher mythology deals with gods, yet their names are often equally opaque!) Some such evil creatures have appeared, figuratively speaking, the day before yesterday, but that does not prevent them from hiding their origin with envious dexterity (after all, they are imps). A famous evader is gremlin.

By Anatoly Liberman Although a German word, Pumpernickel (which in what follows will not be capitalized) seems to be sufficiently familiar to the English speaking world not to require a gloss. The origin of the bread (Westphalia, and there perhaps the town of Osnabr¼cken) has been ascertained, but the etymology of the name remains a puzzle'at least to some extent.

By Anatoly Liberman In our enlightened age, we are beginning to forget how thickly the world of our ancestors was populated by imps and devils. Shakespeare still felt at home among them, would have recognized Grimalkin, and, as noted in a recent post, knew the charm aroint thee, which scared away witches. Flibbertigibbet (a member of a sizable family in King Lear), the wily Rumpelstilzchen, and their kin have names that are sometimes hard to decipher, a fact of which Rumpelstilzchen was fully aware.

By Anatoly LibermanLanguage controlled by ruling powers? Very much depends on whether the country has a language academy that decides what is correct and what is wrong. Even in the absence of such an organization, a committee consisting of respected scholars and politicians sometimes lays down the law. Spelling is a classic case of 'ruling the language.'

By Anatoly Liberman As has often happened in the recent past, this essay is an answer to a letter, but I will not only address the question of our correspondent but also develop the topic and write about Old Nick, his crew, and the goblin. The question was about the origin of the words bogey and boggle. I have dealt with both in my dictionary and in passing probably in the blog.

By Anatoly Liberman I could have spent a hundred years bemoaning English spelling, but since no one is paying attention, this would have been a wasted life. Not every language can boast of useless letters; fortunately, English is one of them. However, it is in good company, especially if viewed from a historical perspective. Such was Russian, which once overflowed with redundant letters.

By Anatoly Liberman It may not be too widely known how hard it is to discover the origin of even 'easy' words. Most people realize that the beginning of language is lost and that, although we can sometimes reconstruct an earlier stage of a word, we usually stop when it comes to explaining why a given combination of sounds is endowed with the meaning known to us.

By Anatoly Liberman Some time ago I read Sidney P. Moss's 1984 book Charles Dickens' Quarrel with America. Those who remember MartinCuzzlewit and the last chapter of American Notes must have a good idea of the 'quarrel.' However, this post is, naturally, not on the book or on Dickens's nice statement: 'I have to go to America'on my way to the Devil' (this statement is used as an epigraph to Moss's work).

By Anatoly LibermanThief again. One comment on thief referred to an apparently admissible Lithuanian cognate. It seems that if we were dealing with an Indo-European word of respectable antiquity, more than a single Baltic verb for 'cower' or 'seize' would have survived in this group. I also mentioned the possibility of borrowing, and another correspondent wondered from whom the Goths could learn such a word.

By Anatoly Liberman This post is an answer to a letter I received from our correspondent Jonathan Davis. Not too long ago, I mentioned the differences in the pronunciation of niche: in the speech of most Americans it rhymes with pitch, but the rhyme niche/leash can also be heard, and it seems to be prevalent in Britain. Mr. Davis is an Englishman living in Texas and, not unexpectedly, favors the vowel of ee and sh in niche, while those around him prefer short i and ch.

By Anatoly Liberman Within a year, two recent articles on the origin of the word boy have come to my attention. This is great news. Keeping a talent of such value under a bushel and withholding it from the rest of the world would be unforgivable. Nowadays, if a philological journal does not come as a reward for the membership in a popular society, its circulation is extremely low.

By Anatoly Liberman The title of this post is meant to warn our readers that the origin of the word thief has never been discovered. Perhaps an apology is in order. I embarked on today's seemingly thankless topic after I received a question from Denmark about the possible ties between Danish to 'two' and tyv 'thief.'

By Anatoly Liberman I am saying goodbye to the Harlem Shake. The miniseries began two weeks ago withdance, moved on to twerk and twerp, and now the turn of the verb shake has come round. Reference books say little about the origin of shake. They usually list a few cognates and produce the Germanic etymon skakan (both a's were short)

By Anatoly Liberman I decided to throw a look at a few tw-words while writing my previous post on the origin of dance. In descriptions of grinding and the Harlem Shake, twerk occurs with great regularity. The verb means 'to move one's buttocks in a suggestive way.' It has not yet made its way into OED and perhaps never will (let us hope so), but its origin hardly poses a problem: twerk must be a blend of twist (or twitch) and work (or jerk).

By Anatoly Liberman American schools dance nonstop. A wild display of 'flailing arms and wriggling torsos,' known as the Harlem Shake, is the latest addition to our civilization. High school 'kids' writhe eel-like on the floor, chairs, and tables, fall, sometimes break arms and legs, and have fun, which is the unassailable backbone of our educational system. At some places, teachers and principals dance with the kids and thus double the amount of fun.

By Anatoly Liberman My usual thanks to those who have commented on the posts, written me letters privately or through OUP, and corrected the rare but irritating typos. I especially appreciate comments that deal with the languages remote from my sphere of interest: Arabic, Farsi, Romany, and so forth. But, even while dealing with the languages that are close to my area of expertise (for example, Sanskrit and Frisian), quite naturally, I feel less comfortable in them than in English, German, or Icelandic (my 'turf').

By Anatoly Liberman Dozens of words have not been forgotten only because Shakespeare used them. Scotch (as in scotchthesnake), bare bodkin, and dozens of others would have taken their quietus and slept peacefully in the majestic graveyard of the Oxford English Dictionary but for their appearance in Shakespeare's plays. Aroint would certainly have been unknown but for its appearance in Macbeth and King Lear.

By Anatoly Liberman The questions people ask about word origins usually concern slang, family names, and idioms. I cannot remember being ever asked about the etymology of house, fox, or sun. These are such common words that we take them for granted, and yet their history is often complicated and instructive. In this blog, I usually stay away from them, but I sometimes let my Indo-European sympathies run away with me. Today's subject is of this type.

By Anatoly Liberman I am picking up where I left off a week ago. Mare and Mars. Can they be related? The chance is close to zero. Both words are of obscure origin, and attempts to explain an opaque word by referring it to an equally opaque one invariably come out wrong.

By Anatoly Liberman Last time I was writing my monthly gleanings in anticipation of the New Year. January 1 came and went, but good memories of many things remain. I would like to begin this set with saying how pleased and touched I was by our correspondents' appreciation of my work, by their words of encouragement, and by their promise to go on reading the blog in the future. Writing weekly posts is a great pleasure.

By Anatoly Liberman Primates have given Germanic language historians great trouble. In the most recent dictionary of German etymology (Kluge-Seebold), the entry Affe 'ape' is one of the most detailed. In the revised version of the OED, monkey is also discussed at a length, otherwise rare in this online edition. Despite the multitude of hypotheses, the sought-for solution is not in view.

By Anatoly Liberman One more drinking vessel, and I'll stop. Strangely, here we have another synonym for bumper, and it is again an old word of unknown origin. In English, goblet turned up in the fourteenth century, but its uninterrupted recorded history began about a hundred years later. Many names of vials, mugs, and beverages probably originated in the language of drinkers, pub owners, and glass manufacturers. They were slang, and we have little chance of guessing who and in what circumstances coined them.

By Anatoly Liberman Very long ago, one of our correspondents asked me how irregular forms like good'better and go'went originated. Not only was he aware of the linguistic side of the problem but he also knew the technical term for this phenomenon, namely 'suppletion.' One cannot say the simplest sentence in English without running into suppletive forms. Consider the conjugation of the verb to be: am, is, are. Why is the list so diverse? And why is it mad'madder and rude'ruder, but bad'worse and good'better?

By Anatoly Liberman One drinks to the coming New Year, and one drinks while remembering the old one. Besides, some do it according to the Gregorian calendar, while others prefer the Julian one. As could be expected, the end of the world has been delayed and life continues. I was touched by the kind words from our regular correspondents; over time they have become my good friends.

By Anatoly Liberman A Happy New Year to our readers and correspondents! Questions, comments, and friendly corrections have been a source of inspiration to this blog throughout 2012, as they have been since its inception. Quite a few posts appeared in response to the questions I received through OUP and privately (by email). As before, the most exciting themes have been smut and spelling.

By Anatoly Liberman This is a story of again; gain will be added as an afterthought. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, dictionaries informed their users that again is pronounced with a diphthong, that is, with the same vowel as in the name of the letter A.

By Anatoly Liberman Some time ago, I devoted three posts to alcoholic beverages: ale, beer, and mead. It has occurred to me that, since I have served drinks, I should also take care of wine glasses. Bumper is an ideal choice for the beginning of this series because of its reference to a large glass full to overflowing. It is a late word, as words go: no citation in the OED predates 1677. If I am not mistaken, the first lexicographer to include it in his dictionary was Samuel Johnson (1755). For a long time bumper may have been little or not at all known in polite society.

By Anatoly Liberman For some time I have fought a trench war, trying to prove that fowl and fly are not connected. The pictures of an emu and an ostrich appended to the original post were expected to clinch the argument, but nothing worked. A few days ago, I saw a rafter of turkeys strutting leisurely along a busy street. Passersby were looking on with amused glee while drivers honked. The birds (clearly, 'fowl') crossed the road without showing the slightest signs of excitement.

By Anatoly LibermanBooze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are. Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin. The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18th century, with the verb booze 'to tipple, guzzle' making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier). The riddles connected with booze are two.

By Anatoly Liberman Toasting, a noble art, deserves the attention of all those (etymologists included) who drink for joy, rather than for getting drunk. The origin of the verb to toast 'parch,' which has been with us since the end of the 14th century, poses no problems. Old French had toster 'roast, grill,' and Italian tostare seems to be an unaltered continuation of the Romance protoform. Tost- is the root of the past participle of Latin torrere (the second conjugation) 'parch.' English has the same root in torrid and less obviously

By Anatoly Liberman The word beestings once had its day in court. About half a century ago, American linguists were busy discussing whether there is something they called juncture, a boundary signal that supposedly helps people to distinguish ice cream from I scream when they hear such combinations. A special sign (#) was introduced in transcription: /ais#krim/ as opposed to /ai#skrim/. The two crown examples for the existence of juncture in Modern English were nitrate versus night rate and beestings versus bee stings. I remember asking

By Anatoly LibermanHabit, in addition to the meaning that is universally known ('settled disposition of mind and body'), can also designate 'apparel,' even though in restricted contexts, such as monk's habit or riding habit. At first sight, these senses do not belong together, and yet they do. The word is, of course, a 'loan' from French. (I have mentioned more than once that linguistic loans are permanent, for they are never returned, except when, for example, an ancient Germanic, that is, Franconian word

By Anatoly Liberman The best way of finding out whether 'the world' is watching you is to err. The moment I deviate from the path of etymological virtue I am rebuffed, and this keeps me on my toes. Even an innocent typo 'causes disappointment' (as it should). Walter W. Skeat: 'But the dictionary-maker must expect, on the one hand, to be snubbed when he makes a mistake, and on the other, to be neglected when he is right' (1890). Apparently, this blog does not exist in a vacuum, though I would welcome more questions and comments in addition to rebuttals and neglect. Among other things, I noticed that

By Anatoly Liberman For this essay I have to thank Walter Turner, who asked me about the origin of larrup. The verb means 'beat, thrash, whip, flog.' Long before my database became available in printed form as A Bibliography of EnglishEtymology, I described in a special post what kind of lexical fish my small-meshed net had caught. (Sorry for the florid style. I remember a dean saying in irritation to one of the speakers at

By Anatoly LibermanLunker seems to be well-known in the United States and very little in British English. Mark Twain used lunkhead 'blockhead.' Lunker surfaced in books later, but lunkhead must have been preceded by lunk, whatever it meant. In today's American English, lunker has several unappetizing and gross connotations, and we will let them be: one cannot constantly deal with turd and genitals.

By Anatoly Liberman Because of the frequency of the words the, this, that, these, those, them, their, there, then, and with, the letter h probably occurs in our texts more often than any other (for Shakespeare's epoch thee and thou should have been added). But then of course we have think, three, though, through, thousand, and words with ch, sh,

By Anatoly Liberman I was delighted to hear from a fellow journalist that his experience matches mine: no reaction when one's work is good and immediate rebuke when one errs. However, critics save us from complacency, so may they keep their vigil. I am particularly grateful for the explanation about the difference between in future 'from now on' and in the future 'in days to come,' because

By Anatoly Liberman Practically everything that can be said about the origin of penguin has been said in the OED, and in what follows I will only touch on three later works on the subject. It must be admitted that these works are almost as flightless as the bird they discuss. Here is the relevant part of the digest of the OED's long note, as it appears in The OxfordDictionary of English Etymology: ''¦of unknown origin; first recorded in both applications [that is, as 'great auk' and as 'penguin'] in reports

By Anatoly Liberman Like the previous post on penguin, this one has been written in response to a question from our correspondent. His surname is Jump, and he has investigated the origin of the homonymous verb quite well. My task consists in adding a few details to what can be found in the Internet and easily available dictionaries.

By Anatoly Liberman

The adjective
pretty had such a tempestuous history that it deserves an essay, even though no new facts are likely to shed light on the obscurities of its development. We will move from Old English tricks to Jack Sprat (surely, you remember: 'Jack Sprat could eat no fat, / His wife could eat no lean; / and so betwixt them both, you see, / They licked the plate clean'), from Welsh
praith 'act, deed' to Russian
bred 'delirium' and end up pretty much where we were at the beginning.

By Anatoly Liberman Half of 2011 is behind us. This is reason enough for looking through one's notes and offering a retrospect. Old Business Once again many thanks to those who responded to my question about the difference between in future and in the future. I am sure

By Anatoly Liberman Before we embark on the etymology of golf, something should be said about the pronunciation of the word. Golf does not rhyme with wolf (because long ago w changed the vowel following it), but in the speech of some people it rhymes with oaf, and 'goafers' despises everyone who would allow l to creep in

By Anatoly Liberman Where there is golf, there are clubs; hence this post. But club is an intriguing word regardless of the association. It surfaced only in Middle English. Since the noun believed to be its etymon, namely klubba, has been attested in Old Icelandic, dictionaries say that club came to English with the Vikings or their descendants. Perhaps it did. In Icelandic, klubba coexists with its synonym klumba, and the opinion prevails that bb developed from mb, which later became mp.

By Anatoly Liberman It is inevitable that after dealing with club 'cudgel' we should ask ourselves where club 'group of members' came from. Some people think that the explanation is natural and easy. Skeat was among them. Following his etymology of club 'cudgel,' he also derived this club from a Scandinavian source and commented: 'Lit[erally] 'a clump of people'.

By Anatoly Liberman When asked about the origin of a certain word, I often answer: 'I have no idea' (in addition, of course, to 'I don't remember' and 'I have to look it up in a good dictionary'). Sometimes, after consulting a dictionary, I add: 'No one knows.' The questioners express surprise: a doctor should be able to diagnose patients, a plumber is called to fix the leak, and etymologists are evidently paid for explaining the origin of words. There may or might be a fat living in

By Anatoly LibermanInkling: English is full of such cozy, homey words. There is the noun inkle 'linen tape or thread' and the verb inkle 'to whisper.' The noun is still listed as current, while the verb, which was extremely rare in the past, has survived only in dialectal use. Both, as well as inkling, were first recorded in Middle English, but little can be said about them. Winkle, twinkle, and crinkle shed no light on their past. Inkle 'tape' and inkle 'whisper' don't seem to belong together. Dutch has enkel 'simple,' and Swedish has enkel 'single.'

By Anatoly Liberman In those rare cases in which people ask my advice about good writing, I tell them not to begin (to not begin?) their works with epigraphs from Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, for the rest will look like an insipid anticlimax, and, disdainful of ground-to-dust buzzwords and familiar quotations, I also suggest that people avoid (naturally, like the plague) such titles as 'A Tale of Two Friendships/ Losses/ Wars,' etc. and resist the temptation to

By Anatoly Liberman Suggestions on the origin of tennis go back to the beginning of English etymological lexicography, and one can teach a semester-long course by using only the attempts to discover who, where, when, and why called the game this. The game of tennis is not called tennis in any other language, unless a borrowing from English is used (as happened to hockey and football among others), and some people thought this was reason enough to insist on the English origin of the word. They asked questions like: 'Why should we go

By Anatoly Liberman From time to time I mention the unsung heroes of English etymology, but only once have I devoted a post to such a hero (Frank Chance), though I regularly sing praises to Charles P.G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary. Today I would like to speak about Joseph Wright (1855-1930). He was not an etymologist in the strict sense of this term, but no article on the origin of English words can do without consulting TheEnglish DialectDictionary he edited.

By Anatoly Liberman One of our most faithful correspondents writes: 'According to the Wall Street Journal, Indiana now outlawed teaching script in schools, so the kids can concentrate on their typing.' He was saddened by the news, and so was I. He asked me about non-cursive writing in old times, especially in the days of Chaucer. Here is a

By Anatoly Liberman We are in deep waters here. A first puzzle is that ship has exact cognates in Frisian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, and Gothic, but nowhere outside Germanic. The ancient Indo-Europeans called their floating vessel something else, and we know what they called it. The modern echo of that word can be seen in Latin navis (from whose root we have navigation; and remember Captain Nemo's Nautilus 'little ship' and the Argonauts?), as well as in several other languages. So why ship?

By Anatoly Liberman Alongside Old Icelandic skip 'ship,' we find the verb skipa 'arrange; assign.' It is tempting to suggest that the unattested meaning of this verb was either 'arrange things on a ship; prepare a ship for a voyage; make it secure and shipshape' or even 'board a ship, travel by ship,' because the connection between skip and skipa can hardly be doubted. However, not improbably, the earliest meaning of ship was simply 'thing made, artifact,' rather than 'vessel,' with skipa reminding us of that sense.

I decided to stay at sea for at least two more weeks. The history of the word frigate is expected to comfort Germanic scholars, who may not know that, regardless of the language, the names of ships invariably give etymologists grief. In English, frigate is from French, and in French it is from Italian, so that the question is: Where did Italian fregata come from? Naturally, nobody knows. Although the literature

By Anatoly LibermanIngle is usually derived from Celtic. The Scots form is the same as the English one, while Irish Gaelic has aingeal. The Celtic word is a borrowing of Latin ignis 'fire' (cf. Engl. ignite, ignition). Therefore, some etymologists derive Engl. ingle directly from the Latin diminutive igniculus; ingle nook gives this derivation some support. Be that as it may, no path leads from ingle to inkling.

By Anatoly Liberman The history of boat is no less obscure than the history of ship. Britain was colonized by Germanic-speakers in the fifth century CE from northern Germany and Denmark. It is hard to imagine that the invaders, who became known to history as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes and who must have known a good deal about navigation, stopped using boats after they crossed the Channel. But a cognate of boat has not turned up in any modern dialect spoken on the southern coast of the North Sea.

By Anatoly Liberman When we deal with the origin of ship and boat (the names of things pertaining to material culture), problems are almost predictable. Such words may have been borrowed from an unknown language (or from an attested language, but definitive proof of the connection is wanting) or coined in a way we are unable to reconstruct, but wife? Yet its etymology is no less obscure. My proposal will add to the existing stock of conjectures, and the future will show whether it has any chance of survival, let alone acceptance.

By Anatoly Liberman During five and a half years of its existence, this blog has featured the periodical Notes and Queries twice. Why I am turning to this subject again (now probably for the last time) will become clear at the end of the post. Notes and Queries appeared on November 3, 1849. In a series of short notes (naturally, notes) spread over the years 1876-1877, its first editor William John Thoms (1803-1885) told the world how the periodical had become a reality and how almost overnight

Nobody wants to be called a bigot, but accusations of bigotry are hurled at political opponents with great regularity, because (obviously) everyone who disagrees with us is a bigot, and it is to the popularity of this ignominious word that I ascribe the frequency with which I am asked about its origin. Rather long ago I wrote about bigot in the 'gleanings,' but answers in the 'gleanings' tend to be lost, while a separate essay will pop up in the Internet every time someone will ask: 'Where did bigot come from?'

By Anatoly Liberman This has been a long month, and I was very pleased to have such generous feedback. Today I'll only respond to the comments and will deal with the questions next Wednesday. Many thanks to our correspondents who take the time to agree and disagree with me and suggest new topics. In one comment, my responses were called derogatory. God forbid! Why should they even sound such to anyone? I may misunderstand an opponent or refuse to go all the way with him or her ('them'), but I am truly grateful for the attention my blog receives, and I like to hear counterarguments, even though no one's opinion has ever changed as a result of discussion.

By Anatoly Liberman The spelling of those two words does not bother us only because both are so common and learned early in life. Yet why not shure and shugar? There is a parallel case, and it too leaves us indifferent, though for a different reason.

By Anatoly Liberman All sources inform us about the Arabic-Turkish home of the word coffee, though in the European languages some forms were taken over directly from Arabic, so that the etymological part of the relevant entry in dictionaries and encyclopedias needs modification. There is a possibility of coffee being connected with the name of the kingdom of Kaffa, but this question need not bother us at the moment. The main puzzle is the development of the form coffee rather than its distant origin.

By Anatoly Liberman It was good to hear from Masha Bell, an ally in the losing battle for reformed spelling.Â Her remarks can be found at the end of the previous post (it was about su- in sure and sugar), and here I'll comment briefly only on her questions.Â

By Anatoly Liberman Some time ago, a colleague asked me what materials I have on the place name Rotten Row; she was going to write an article on this subject. But her plans changed, and the article did not appear. My folders contain a sizable batch of letters to Notes and Queries and essays from other popular sources dealing with Rotten Row. I am not a specialist in onomastics, and, if I am not mistaken, the question about the etymology of Rotten Row has never been answered to everybody's satisfaction.

By Anatoly Liberman The year 2011 is coming to an end. Strange that we say 'come to an end,' even though a year, unlike a rope, a street, and even life, in which it is hard to make ends (or both ends) meet, can have only one end, but such are the caprices of usage. In any case, the end of the year is close at hand. Those interested in such tricks may recollect that year sometimes needs neither the definite nor the indefinite article when we speak about this time of year, and so it has been for centuries.

By Anatoly Liberman Last Wednesday, in anticipation of the inevitable calendar leap, I discussed the origin of the word end. The end has come. This post happens to be the last in 2011 ' not really a rite of passage, for a week from now another Wednesday will bring the world another post, dated January 4, 2012. As announced, it will be devoted to the verb begin. One should not take December or oneself too seriously, but I am pleased to say that this blog is read and quoted by many and that I continue to receive letters and comments from all over the world.

By Anatoly Liberman As promised, the first of the fifty-two posts due to appear in 2012 will be devoted to the verb begin, whose siblings have been attested in all the West Germanic languages (English is one of them) and Gothic. Surprisingly, they did not turn up in Old Scandinavian, except for Danish (under the influence of German?). Old Icelandic for 'begin' was byrja, and its cognates continued into Norwegian and Swedish, let alone Modern Icelandic and Faroese. The etymology of begin has not been explained to everybody's satisfaction, but such is the history of most etymological flesh.

By Anatoly Liberman Like all word columnists, I keep receiving the same questions again and again.Â Approximately once a month someone asks me about the origin of the F-word, the C-word, and gay.Â Well, the C-word has been investigated in great detail, and a few conjectures are not so bad.

In the post on the C-word, I made two mistakes, for both of which I am sorry, though neither was due to chance. In Middle High German, the word klotze 'vagina' existed, and I was going to write that, given such a noun, the verb klotzen 'copulate' can also be reconstructed.

by Anatoly Liberman The question about the origin of gay 'homosexual' has been asked and answered many times (and always correctly), so that we needn't expect sensational discoveries in this area. The adjective gay, first attested in Middle English, is of French descent; in the fourteenth century it meant both 'joyous' and 'bright; showy.' The OED gives no attestations of gay 'immoral' before 1637.

By Anatoly Liberman I usually try to discuss words whose origin is so uncertain that, when it comes to etymology, dictionaries refuse to commit themselves. But every now and then words occur whose history has been investigated most convincingly, and their history is worth recounting. Such is the word odd. Everything is odd about it, including the fact that its original form has not survived in English.

By Anatoly Liberman Unlike hogwash or, for example, flapdoodle, the noun balderdash is a word of 'uncertain' (some authorities even say of 'unknown') origin. However, what is 'known' about it is probably sufficient for questioning the disparaging epithets.

By Anatoly Liberman I borrowed the title of this post from an ad for an alcoholic beverage whose taste remains unknown to me. The picture shows two sparsely clad very young females sitting in a bar on both sides of a decently dressed but bewildered youngster. I assume their age allows all three characters to drink legally and as much as they want. My concern is not with their thirst but with the word dude. After all, this blog is about the origin of nouns, verbs, and adjectives, rather than the early stages of alcoholism.

By Anatoly Liberman There has been a good deal to glean this month because the comments and responses have been numerous and also because, although February is a short month even in a leap year, in 2012 it had five Wednesdays. Among the questions was one about the profession and qualifications of an etymologist. It is a recurring question from young correspondents, and I have answered it briefly more than once, but always in the 'gleanings.' It occurred to me that perhaps I should write a short essay on this subject and, if someone else asks me about such things in the future, I will be able to refer to this post. The rest will be discussed next week.

By Anatoly Liberman The Infamous C-Word. This is the letter I received soon after the publication of the post devoted to our (formerly) most unpronounceable word: ''¦I am writing to ask you if you have run across it [this word] as a nautical term. I am a former sailing ship mariner (a.k.a. 'tall ships') and sailmaker and currently maritime historian/editor for the National Maritime Historical Society.

By Anatoly Liberman Since this blog is now in the seventh year of its existence (if I remember correctly, it started in March 2006), some questions tend to recur. Our correspondent wants to know the origin of the word winter. Long ago I touched on winter and summer, but briefly, in the 'gleanings,' so that it may be useful to devote a short series to the Germanic names of the seasons, leave these posts in the archive, and thus avoid possible repetition.

By Anatoly Liberman The ancient Indo-Europeans lived in the northern hemisphere (see the previous post), but, although this conclusion is certain, it does not follow that they divided the year into four seasons. Our perception of climate is colored too strongly by Vivaldi, the French impressionists, and popular restaurants. At some time, the Indo-Europeans dominated the territory from India to Scandinavia (hence the name scholars gave them). They lived and traveled in many climate zones, and no word for 'winter,' 'spring,' 'summer,' and 'autumn' is common to the entire family; yet some cover several language groups.

By Anatoly Liberman I have received many questions, some of which are familiar (they recur with great regularity) and others that are new and will answer a few today and the rest in a month's time. Nostratic Hypothesis. Our correspondent Mr. Steve Miller asked me whether I ever treat the topic of language evolution and, if I do, what I think of the Nostratic hypothesis.

By Anatoly Liberman The Latin for 'winter; snowstorm' is hiems, a noun related in a convoluted way to Engl. hibernate. It is a reflex (continuation) of an old Indo-European word for 'winter,' and its cognates in various languages are numerous. Germanic must also have had one of them, but it lies hidden like the proverbial needle in a hayrick. Old Icelandic (OI) gymbr means 'one-year old sheep.' In the Scandinavian area, this word does not have an exotic ring, as follows from Modern Icelandic and Norwegian gimber ~ gymber ~ gimmerlam (the latter refers specifically to a sheep that has not yet lambed), along with Swedish gymmer with its dialectal variants.

By Anatoly Liberman My February blog on dude has been picked up by several websites, and rather numerous comments were the result of the publicity. Below, I will say what I think of the word's 'true' etymology and quote two pronouncements on 'dudedom,' as they once appeared in The Nation. But before doing all that, I should thank the readers who pointed to me the existence of some recent contributions to the subject.

By Anatoly Liberman My romance with shrimp began when, years ago, I looked up the etymology of scrumptious in some modern dictionary. Naturally, it turned out that the word's origin is unknown (this happens every time I try to satisfy my curiosity in the area of my specialization). The usually sensible Century Dictionary suggests that scrumptious is an alternation of scrimptious, from scrimption, a funny noun going back to scrimp. The OED thinks so too.

By Anatoly Liberman Two weeks ago, I pondered the fortunes of the gregarious shrimp. The next ingredient of the scr- ~ shr- cocktail will be the much maligned but innocent shrew. As The Century Dictionary puts it, 'there is no foundation in fact for the vulgar notion that shrews are poisonous, or for any other of the popular superstitions respecting these harmless little creatures.' The shrew is an insectivorous mammal. An old etymology traced shrew to a root meaning 'cut' (as in shear) and glossed the word as 'biter' on account of its allegedly venomous bite. Another version of this etymology refers to the shrew's pointed snout. The Old High German cognate of shrew meant 'dwarf' (a figure cut short?).

By Anatoly Liberman Why don't good and hood rhyme with food and mood? Why are friend and fiend spelled alike but pronounced differently? There is a better way of asking this question, because the reason for such oddities is always the same: English retains the spelling that made sense centuries ago. At one time, the graphic forms we learn one by one made sense. Later the pronunciation changed, while the spelling remained the same. Therefore, the right question is: What has happened to the pronunciation of the words that give us trouble?

By Anatoly Liberman Several people pointed out to me that I cannot distinguish a shrimp from a prawn, and I am afraid they are right. The picture copied for the shrimp post had the title 'Shrimp cocktail,' but the shrimp there are too big and are really prawns. In any case, I decided to atone for my mistake and write a post on the etymology of prawn. This plan was hard to realize, because the origin of prawn is really, that is, hopelessly unknown: the word exists, but no one can say where it has come from. It is strange that more or less the same holds for shrimp and shark, though both are less opaque. There must have been some system behind calling those sea creatures. The fishermen who coined such names had a reason to call a shrimp a shrimp and a prawn a prawn.

By Anatoly Liberman The fishy series in this blog began with shrimp, reached the heights of prawn, and now, bypassing countless intermediate steps, will offer a discussion of shark. I am sorry to admit that despite the monster's size and voracity I can say deplorably little about the chosen subject, but, since I always deal with obscure vocabulary, I suffer from self-inflicted wounds and have no reason to complain. Before I come to the point, an apology is in order. While compiling my voluminous bibliography of English etymology, I didn't encounter references to Tom Jones's publication on shark.

By Anatoly Liberman Shrew again. Soon after I posted an essay on shrew, in which I dissociated that word from a verb meaning 'cut,' a correspondent asked me how my etymology (from 'devil') could be reconciled with the obvious connection between Old Engl. scirfemus (related to sceorfan 'cut') and German Schermaus (related to scheren, the same meaning), the latter from Middle High German scheremus. (The relevant forms can be found in the OED.) The connection referred to in the letter cannot be denied, but I think that both the Old English and the Middle High German word owe their existence to folk etymology: the shrew was associated with venom and its name underwent change.

By Anatoly Liberman Spelling. I am grateful for the generous comments on my post in the heartbreak series 'The Oddest English Spellings.' Several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Masha Bell at a congress in Coventry, and around that time I corresponded with Valerie Yule. A positive comment from Peter Demaere (Canada) reinforced my message. The situation is as odd as English spelling. Spelling reform had famous supporters from the start. Great linguists, including Walter W. Skeat and Otto Jespersen, and outstanding authors and public figures agreed that we should no longer spell the way we do.

By Anatoly Liberman The literature on the history of the Oxford English Dictionary is extensive, but I am not sure that there is a book-length study of the reception of this great dictionary. When in 1884 the OED's first fascicle reached the public, it was met with near universal admiration. I am aware of only two critics who went on record with their opinion that the venture was doomed to failure because it would take forever to complete, because all the words can not and should not be included in a dictionary, and because the slips at Murray's disposal must contain numerous misspellings and mistakes.

By Anatoly Liberman The problem with Christopher Robin's woozles and heffalumps was that no one knew exactly what those creatures looked like. The boy just happened to be 'lumping along' when he detected the exotic creature. 'I saw one once,' said Piglet. 'At least I think I did,' he said. 'Only perhaps it wasn't.' So did I,' said Pooh, wondering what a Heffalump was like. 'You don't often see them,' said Christopher Robin carelessly. Tracking a woozle was no easy task either. 'Hallo!' said Piglet, 'what are you doing?'

By Anatoly Liberman The fish known as Clupea harengas has two main names: in the Scandinavian countries, it is called sild or something similar (this name made its way to Finland and Russia), while in the lands where the West Germanic languages are spoken (English belongs to this group) the word is herring, also with several variants, for example, German Hering (the spelling H¤ring is quite obsolete), Dutch haring, and so forth. The rarely used English word sile 'young herring' is a late adaptation of sild. The origin of both sild and herring is doubtful.

By Anatoly Liberman Not that I can say anything quotable on the subject of the mackerel, but people keep writing about it and the attempts to understand how this fish got its name are so interesting that the story may be worth telling. Only one thing seems certain. Mackerel first appeared in a West-European text, in the French form makerels (plural) about 1140 (which means that it was known much earlier), and no one doubts that the English borrowed their word from Old or Anglo-French. From France it spread to other lands, sometimes through an intermediary. The question is why the French called the mackerel this.

By Anatoly Liberman The forms in the title are substandard but ubiquitous in conversational English, and the universally understood reference to the genre called whodunit (it originated about seventy years ago) testifies to its partial victory. I have often heard the question about their origin and will try to answer it, though my information is scanty and to the best of my knowledge, a convincing theory of whodunit (the construction, not the genre) is lacking, which does not augur well for a detective story.

By Anatoly Liberman All modern dictionaries state that the adverb ajar goes back to the phrase on char, literally 'on the turn' (= 'in the act of turning'). This is, most probably, a correct derivation. However, such unanimity among even the most authoritative recent sources should be taken with caution because reference books tend to copy from one another. Recycling a plausible opinion again and again produces an illusion of solidity in an area notorious for debatable results. That is why it is so interesting to read books published before Skeat's dictionary (1882) and the OED came out.

By Anatoly LibermanFarting and participles (not to be confused with cabbages and kings). Summer is supposed to be a dead season, but I cannot complain: many people have kindly offered their comments and sent questions. Of the topics discussed in July and August, flatulence turned out to be the greatest hit. I have nothing to add to the comments on fart. Apparently, next to the election campaign, the problem of comparable interest was breaking wind in Indo-European.

By Anatoly Liberman I have written more than once that the only hope to reform English spelling would be by doing it piecemeal, that is, by nibbling away at a comfortable pace. Unfortunately, reformers used to attack words like have and give and presented hav and giv to the irate public. This was too radical a measure; bushes exist for beating about them. Several chunks of orthographic fat are crying to be cut off.

By Anatoly Liberman An etymologist is constantly on the lookout for so-called motivation. Why is a cat called cat, and why do English speakers say tree if the Romans called the same object arbor? As everybody knows, the 'ultimate truth' usually escapes us. Once upon a time (about five thousand or even more years ago?) in a hotly debated locality there lived the early Indo-Europeans, and we still use words going back to their partly unpronounceable sound complexes.

By Anatoly Liberman First and foremost, many thanks to those who have sent questions and comments and corrected my mistakes. A good deal has been written about the nature of mistakes, and wise dicta along the errare humanum est lines have been formulated. Yes, to err is human, but it is the stupidity and 'injustice' of some mistakes that are particularly vexing.

By Anatoly Liberman Last week's 'gleanings' were devoted to spelling and ended with the promise to address the other questions in the next installment. But, since the previous part inspired some comments, I will briefly return to Spelling Reform. One of the questions was: 'Who needs the reform?' Everybody does. At present, children spend hours learning 'hieroglyphs' like chair, choir, character, ache, douche, weird, pierce, any and many versus Annie and manly, live (verb) versus live (adjective), and hundreds of others.

By Anatoly Liberman The title of this post sounds like an introduction of two standup comedians, but my purpose is to narrate a story of two nautical words. The origin of one seems to be lost, the other looks deceptively transparent; but there may be hope. Both turned up in the seventeenth century: in 1624 (awning) and 1607 (tarpaulin) respectively.

By Anatoly Liberman Etymology, a subject rarely studied on our campuses, enjoys the respect of many people, even though they persist in calling it entomology. Human beings always want to know the origin of things, but sometimes etymology is made to carry double, like the horse in O. Henry's story 'The Roads We Take.' For instance, it is sometimes said that etymology helps us to use words correctly. Alas, it very seldom does so. If someone asks us about the meaning of the adjective debonair and is not only informed that a debonair man is genial, suave, and so forth but also that the adjective goes back to the French phrase de bon aire 'of good disposition (nature),' this may help.

By Anatoly Liberman Fowl, fox, and pooch. My cautious reservations about a tie between the etymon of fowl and the verb fly were dismissed in one of the comments. Therefore, a few additional notes on that word may be in order. The origin of fowl is uncertain, that is, controversial, not quite unknown.

By Anatoly Liberman Bullying is a hot topic. Strict laws have been passed with the view of intimidating the intimidators or at least keeping them at bay. Regardless of the consequences such measures may have, linguists cannot ignore the problem and keep out of the public eye. So to arms, comrades! That a word like bully should vex etymologists needn't surprise anybody.

By Anatoly Liberman It has been a tempestuous month in the world but a quiet one in the department of English etymology. Both the comments and the questions I received dealt with separate words, and there have been not too many of them. Lollygag. In July 2007 I already wrote what I thought about this word. Although most people, at least in America, say lollygag, its doublet lallygag is well-known. The variation is typical.

By Anatoly Liberman It cannot but come as a surprise that against the background of countless important words whose origin has never been discovered some totally insignificant verbs and nouns have been traced successfully and convincingly to the very beginning of Indo-European. Fart ('not in delicate use') looks like a product of our time, but it has existed since time immemorial. Even the nuances have not been lost: one thing is to break wind loudly (farting); quite a different thing is to do it quietly (the now obscure 'fisting').

Question: How large is an average fluent speaker's vocabulary?Answer: I have often heard this question, including its variant: 'Is it true that English contains more words than any other (European) language?' The problem is that 'an average fluent speaker' does not exist. Also, it is important to distinguish between how many words we recognize (our so-called passive vocabulary) and how many we use in everyday communication (active vocabulary).